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SALT LAKE CITY — Richard "Rick" Reese, a pioneer in the Utah and Intermountain West outdoor recreation and conversation community, died earlier this month at his home in Bozeman, Montana. He was 79.
Reese's role in the region's outdoor communities was large. The Utah native helped forge many rock-climbing routes in the Wasatch Mountains as early as in the 1960s that are still enjoyed today, said Julia Geisler, the executive director of the Salt Lake Climbing Alliance.
"He left us a legacy of climbing," she said during an event about Little Cottonwood Canyon last week.
Reese also authored the Utah Geographic Series, which included five books about Utah's outdoors. Salt Lake City Public Lands added that Reese was "instrumental" in creating the Bonneville Shoreline Trail Committee in the 1990s — a trail system used by countless people across the Wasatch Front daily.
Born in Salt Lake City in 1942, growing up in Utah played a huge role in his life, his family wrote in an obituary.
"He grew up in Utah ingrained with a solid work ethic and enamored from a young age with a passion for the outdoors," they wrote.
Reese reflected on that childhood in a 2008 interview as a part of the Everett L. Cooley Oral History Project at the University of Utah.
While there wasn't much of a climbing scene at the time, the movie "The Conquest of Everest," which he saw with friends at the Tower Theater when he was 12 years old, inspired him to venture more into the outdoors.
"I was absolutely smitten; and I thought 'wow, I want to be a mountain climber,'" he said in that interview. "After the movie, we came out in the lobby and they had mountain tents and crampons and ice axes ... and I rounded up some friends and we headed to the mountains for the next four or five years. Of course, the Wasatch was an ideal venue for that."
They even took their climbing interests elsewhere. The Southeast Independent, an old Salt Lake City community newspaper, published an article in 1959 about Reese's young climbing adventures. It was published after the article's author, Lloyd Arensen, Reese and Milt Hokansen became the youngest unguided climbing party to summit Mount Rainier in Washington.
Reese, laughing, said in the 2008 interview that none of the three had ever seen a glacier at the time and park rangers refused to let them climb without an adult, so they found a stranger in the parking lot that agreed to climb with them. The adult left the trio before they reached the top, but the group summited the mountain anyway after convincing rangers they knew what they were doing.
That venture sparked the climbing movement that Geisler referenced. He and his friends were invited to join the Alpenblock Climbing Club that had just formed at Olympus High School, and he met other early Utah climbing pioneers like Ted Wilson and Dick Wallin.
Geisler said Reese helped form climbing routes like Crescent Crack in Little Cottonwood and the Open Book and Triple Overhangs on Lone Peak in the Wasatch Mountains.
Reese also went on to graduate from East High School, the University of Utah, and serve in the National Guard for some time. He married Mary Lee after the two met at the U. and had two children.
He also continued to live a life rich in the outdoors, working as a climbing ranger at Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park and participating in "many dangerous rescues" at the Wyoming park before moving to Montana. "The Grand Rescue," a 2013 documentary even featured Reese for his role in a famous 1967 rescue on the North Face of the Grand Teton.
After graduating from college and receiving postgraduate degrees, Reese taught political science at Carroll College beginning in 1979. His family said he became more focused on protecting the environment around this same time.
"He arranged for his students to be interns at the Constitutional Convention where he realized the importance of advocacy and involvement to preserve areas of land, clean air and water, wildlife habitat and wild spaces for future generations," his family wrote. "His teaching at Carroll College inspired young people to get involved in community, government or whatever endeavor that would make a difference."
In 1980, Yellowstone National Park also hired Reese to run what's now called Yellowstone Forever, a nonprofit organization that helps educate people about the park and preserve it for future generations. That side gig allowed him and his wife to introduce "thousands of people to the wonders and wildlife of Yellowstone and creating memories for all that would last a lifetime," his family added.
During that time he also launched the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, from which he retired in 2004. He stayed on as interim executive director for another five years.
His career as a university professor also took him back to Utah. He returned to the Beehive State in 1985 to work on the Utah Geographic Series before taking a job at the University of Utah in 1989. He was the director of the Department of Community Relations up until his retirement in 2003. During that stretch, he would go on to co-chair of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail Committee that was formed in 1990.
High Country News featured the massive Bonneville Shoreline Trail in 1998, as the project had taken shape.
"The trail just seems so self-evidently right, I can't imagine how anyone can resist it," Reese told the outlet at the time.
Indeed, many people use the trail for hiking, running and biking every single day.
Reese returned to Montana after retirement. In 2008, when Reese conducted the University of Utah interview for the J. Willard Marriott Digital Library archives, he ended the interview talking about climbing and the role it had on his life. He said climbing was the "center of a sideline of my life."
"I mean, my life never centered around climbing, except those years where I was doing it almost full time with the (National Park Service), but it still is certainly the most interesting sideline, most interesting avocation in my life," he said.
Reese died on Jan. 9. His family wrote that two celebrations of Reese's life will be held this spring, one in Bozeman and another in Salt Lake City.
They requested that well-wishers donate to one of his favorite conversation nonprofits in lieu of flowers. Those nonprofits include Save Our Canyons, in Utah, as well as the Trust for Public Land, the National Parks Conservation Association and Yellowstone Forever, among others.
